On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 10:11, Svante Signell wrote:
> > > A reinstall of Woody showed that it can only boot from the MBR
> > > partition, not the root partition, i.e.
> > >
> > > boot=/dev/sda, works!
> > > boot=/dev/sda1, does not work!
> >
> > Strange, /dev/hda1 in the form of /dev/md1 works for me.
>
> As seen from the original posting, the boot sector information was
> boot=/dev/sda1
> root=/dev/sda1
> and it did work before, but not after the crash. Explanation?
> When running lilo before and after the same information is displayed:
> Reading boot sector from /dev/sda1
>
> After the crash (with 22.3.3-2):
> Reading boot sector from /dev/sda
> Using MENU secondary loader
> Calling map_insert_data
>
> Can someone explain (or give a pointer to) the different behaviour of
> writing to the MBR vs the root partition?
If you write to the root partition then you need another loader (such as
debian-mbr) to be loaded by the BIOS and then load LILO. If you put LILO in
the MBR then the BIOS calls LILO directly. This makes some minor changes but
should not be anything you would notice.
> > > What has changed for newer versions of lilo? I have been running
> > > Debian stable/testing/unstable for several years now without any
> > > problems before.
> >
> > 22.3 was one of the biggest changes to LILO in recent times that did
> > have potential to cause breakage. The versions after that were minor
> > changes.
>
> The version upgrade was from 22.3.2-1 to 22.3.2-3. The main difference is
> the removal of the /boot/boot.b link.
Which was not used in 22.3.2-1 anyway...
> > > Note also that I have a dual disk system, SCSI and IDE, therefore the
> > > disk=, bios= statements in lilo.conf. The disk partitioning tools,
> > > such as cfdisk requires both the SCSI disk and the IDE disk to have at
> > > least one partition with the boot flag set. Is this really necessary?
> >
> > No. You don't really need any boot flags to be set.
>
> Then why can't I write the partiton table in cfdisk without setting
> the boot flag on one of the partitions of the IDE disk?
That's a deficiency in cfdisk.
When I say you don't need a boot flag to be set I mean that you can have a
fully functional system that boots and runs perfectly without such flags,
regardless of the ability of your fdisk program to deliver such a setup.
I use "fdisk" not "cfdisk" and it allows such a setup with no problems.
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